Category Archives: Social Media

The way you use social media to market your business can have a huge impact on visibility and sales. In 2016, it was estimated that more than 2.3 billion users were active on social media, with about half of these accessing it on their mobile phones. The trend here is obvious. Social media needs to become an important integrative part in 2017 online marketing strategies. Here’s what professionals are saying about how to use – read below 5 fresh tips to remember:

1.) Live video streaming

This connects to people’s focus and even obsession with the “now”. As you can see, social media has enabled live video streaming, which is being employed by soaring numbers of users to show what they are doing right in this moment or what is happening right now. People are watching this sort of content, they’re compelled to click the video because it’s in the now and it fulfills their desire to participate and to be updated on the spot instead of finding out later (the fear of missing out). Use live streaming to attract your audience and make them part of something bigger. Showcase your newest offer, your services or brand related activity to convey a dynamic image and get people involved.

2.) Likes and followers no longer that important

Until recently, businesses had to struggle to build a large following on social sites and to gather as many likes as possible. Nowadays it’s no longer so relevant. Algorithms have changed, in the way that posts only become more visible when published as paid ads. It has thus become more difficult to get organic traffic from social media profiles.

3.) More personalization

Sites like Facebook gather user data to personalize ads shown to each of them. Use this to power up your campaigns and understand your audience better. Create content that appeals to your targeted potential customers. Craft your ads based on their preferences or interests.

4.) More power to private messaging

Applications allowing users to send private messages have been way more popular than standard social media. How does this trend apply to advertizing? Online marketers found ways to advertize directly using private messages – for example users who click on a given ad are taken straight to a live chat feature, where they can get in contact with a brand representative.

5.) Allowing people to connect with each other

Social media heavily relies on this feature – the ability to build communities and groups of people based on a common cause or interest. Successful brands tend to do the same. They gather people around a concept, an idea etc. and let them connect and socialize. It’s often better than simply advertizing your brand. As you let individuals find like-minded people (whether using a forum/message board, live chat or anything that enables grouping and interaction), the expansion of the community will get you new leads.

We are stepping into a new era of virtual interaction and this means new possibilities to market your brand to interested users. Increase your business growth rate by staying on top of social media trends.

Customer loyalty is one of the most important aspects of any business, regardless of whether it is large or small. An industry statistic that is regularly referred to in the world of SEO and online marketing, is that it is up to five times more profitable for any business to cash out money on keeping their best customers happy, then it is to acquire new ones. Small businesses understand this equation most of all. They need to understand how their customers quickly shift their social actions and conversations into the online world.

Soaring adoption of social media is creating an important dynamic within the online marketplace, by changing the power given to a customer. A loyal customer doesn’t have to be represented by occasional referrals or repeat purchases – customers can now express how they feel about a service or product to thousands of people at the same time. So how can you use this to your advantage?

1. Listen to your Market

No business can truly figure out what is going to work best at engaging their customers, especially their best customers, unless they know what it is those customers care about. Blogs, review sites, and other social channels are a valuable resource when it comes to obtaining this priceless information. Customers now have a great platform to inform businesses of exactly what they need to do to succeed, but first the business has to be ready to listen. Remember to consider:

Comments

Relevant posts

Competitor posts

Effectively monitoring the discussion going on in your industry means that you will need to search the online landscape for important dialogue – and this can be a time-consuming matter. However, there are products online which can help, if you know where to start looking.

2. Be Social

Once you have gotten comfortable with the idea of observing your customers and understanding what they’re saying online, you’ll need to start dipping your toes into the realm of social media yourself. Whether you like it or not, the truth is that small businesses will benefit most from getting involved with the same social media sites that their customers frequently use. Fortunately, going social doesn’t have to be as scary as it sounds. In fact, by opening a twitter page, Facebook account, or LinkedIn presence, you could find that you actually have a lot of fun.

3. Engage Your Customers

Finally, it’s essential to make sure that you are active in communicating with your customers. This means that you need to take the time to respond to bad reviews when they happen, or thank customers for good testimonials. This should be a great opportunity for you to engage the best customers you have by getting them to do more online.

You could come up with schemes, such as rewarding people for a certain number of referrals, or sending out pieces of information that they could broadcast about upcoming discounts, sales, and new items.

Of course, communicating with customers can sometimes be difficult in regards to the limited resources and time a small business has. Many of these businesses will find that properly dealing with their audience may require some trial and error.

Communicating a message, whether it is a promotion for your products and services, a contest or just articles on your website, on Twitter can result in great responses. However, the message needs to be delivered correctly so that audience – your followers – can pick it up quickly. To run a successful Twitter account and gain a lot of great benefits from the social network, here are a few things you need to do.

Construct the Right Message

Twitter is 80% noise and 20% useful information. This is just how the social network is developed. Most of the time, you will see users sharing their daily activities, jokes and links to random sites. These are what we call noises. In order for your message to be received, you need to separate yourself from the noise.

A catchy line that users will read when scrolling through the timeline

A link to more information on the message

A picture to help separate the message from other Tweets on the users’ timeline

By combining these three elements, you can reach a high number of followers every time.

Ignite Engagement

Twitter is not the place to do one-way sharing of content. It is a place where users – including yourself – can share, interact and communicate in real-time. Sharing the message and not engaging to responses is just bad practice.

In fact, you should always design your message to arouse engagement. Let users reply, retweet and reshare your message. Have them involved in a conversation or an activity.

A good example of getting engagement is the campaign for The Godzilla 2014 movie. It uses a transparent image of the Godzilla’s tail in the clouds. When seen on Twitter’s timeline – with a white background – the tail is simply invisible. When users started to zoom in – showing the picture against a black background – however, the tail was visible. It instantly went viral and millions of users were talking about it. This is the kind of response you need to ignite.

Tweet Regularly

Just like posting new articles on your blog or website, tweets must also be sent regularly. Not tweeting for a day or two will make users think the account is no longer active; you may lose a lot of followers this way.

Instead of posting sporadically, keep tweeting at least once every two hours. Don’t forget to reply to users publicly (with the user’s Twitter handle on the back of the Tweet) and answer questions to increase your level of engagement.

Interact and Be Personal

The Twitter account may be about your brand, but the person running it is still human. Address users who interact with you on Twitter personally. Answer questions whenever you can and ask questions so users can get involved with sharing valuable content. Don’t forget to incorporate links to a blog post when you need to share something in details. One last thing: don’t hesitate to apologize when you make mistakes.

As most of you should already know, companies today often come with their own website, as well as a handful of useful social media websites that are used to assist in spreading the word about their business and creating brand awareness. However, although having a Facebook page as a small company today may be perfectly common, finding the right content to break through to your target market and keep them coming back for more, is a rare occurrence. The unfortunate truth is that most of your fans don’t actually spend a lot of time reading or even seeing your content on Facebook. So how do you make sure you optimize the fantastic social media design and offer up wonderful content every day?

Write Content the right way

The first and most important aspect of content writing is being relevant. You can choose the best words and select the best tone of voice to reach out to your target market, but nobody is going to be interested in what you have to say unless you’re talking about a topic in context. This means that your Facebook business group cannot update its status talking about the weather or what the marketer is having for dinner, when he or she should be focusing on real estate, or whatever industry the business exists in.

Furthermore, it’s a good idea to keep up to date with promotions, events, holidays, and other exciting marketing techniques for your audience, as this will help you to keep your market engaged throughout the year. Try and present answers to the most common problems your customers have, and if you don’t know what they want to learn about, then ask! Some of the other things you should ensure you do with each post include:

Making sure that you don’t go over 205 characters. This is the longest your message on Facebook can be in a status. However, if you don’t want it to be truncated at all, you will have to cut the number down by about one hundred characters.

Providing interesting and engaging information that your audience is going to want to know more about. If you’re linking to a blog page, make sure that your reader is going to want to continue reading after the first hundred characters of teaser-text.

Call your readers into action. This means asking people to let you know if they agree with what you have to say, to give their opinion on certain things or share if they have something to add. However, this doesn’t mean that you should tell your readers to ‘like if’ something, as Facebook has recently begun to punish groups who try to hoard their followers ‘likes’.

Try including images with your posts, pictures can catch a readers eye more readily than a paragraph of text, and get someone interested in what you have to say. Usually, it’s a better idea to use an original picture than something you have simply found floating around on google.

When it is utilized correctly, social media can be an extremely valuable asset to your company or organization. Whether you are a start-up business, legacy, commercial or non-profit establishment, the ability to communicate and interact with your demographic on a regular basis will help to boost the amount of supporters you receive, build the loyalty of your current customers, and establish a stronger relationship between company and consumer. Like any other marketing tool, social media needs to be properly used if you want to make sure that you maximize the profits you can gain from it and some of the most important things you will need to do when you are getting started include:

Coming Up With a Strategy

Researching Your Audience

Finding the Right Tools

Starting and Joining Conversations

Using Great Media

Figuring Out Your Strategy

Like anything else in business, you should never get started without formulating some kind of plan. It can take a long time to properly build a relationship with a specific demographic, and what you say online can stay with you for a particularly long time. You need to get started knowing exactly what your overall message is going to be. For example, if you want to inform people about the sort of services you have to offer, then you should have an advertisement strategy in place. Next, you should understand that the tools of social media will change and evolve over time, so you need to ensure that you always keep up to date with the platforms your audience are using.

Learn About Your Audience

If you want to make a sale, you need to find customers that want to buy your products. The trouble with this, is that there are usually companies selling similar products and services to yours spread all over the internet, so competition is usually quite harsh. The first thing you need to do to gain an advantage is to research the organizations that have once been in your shoes, this means looking at what your competitors have been doing for the last couple of years. Next, try asking your customers what kind of social media platforms they use on a regular basis, then advertise that you are available on the internet, and ready to be followed.

Finding and Using The Right Tools

One of the ways people online struggle when it comes to social media is concerned with implanting a proper transaction system that will work securely. Social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest, are a fantastic way to communicate with people, join conversations and start debates, but they are not as good as they could be when it comes to ecommerce. Hopefully, new tools that will create a better reaction between social conversation and ecommerce will soon be implemented. Until these are active, however, you will need to apply the right tools for the content you share on social media.

Using Great Media

When it comes to marketing anything, producing content that is interesting and exciting to others is extremely important. A great thing about social media is that it can provide a way of encouraging users to contribute original new content themselves, creating organic text. There are various ways that you can go about encouraging users on a social media site to contribute content to your media channels, and one option is by using great multimedia content. Multimedia content has become increasingly easy to produce these days, and is often a fantastic way of getting people to participate with your social media enterprise. This means you can use videos, images, polls and more to catch your audiences’ attention, and get them involved.

Each year the importance of social media to a well-rounded online marketing plan keeps getting undeniable. You have to invest in your social media strategies to get the maximum ROI on your website online marketing. You also have to consider that each year the number of social media platforms also keep increasing so you have the chance of attaining maximum exposure with this particular aspect of your marketing plan. However, every New Year shows a pathway of successful social media trends. In fact, sticking to outdated trends might actually harm your credibility in the niche and not get you enough returns on the time and money you invest in them. Here is a list of the most up to date trends in the field of Social media marketing to get your startup website going in the head to head in the game with the big leagues of your niche.

Building up rapport with your target audiences

The biggest trend that has compounded over the years is to build rapport with your target audiences. You can do it in several mall ways. The biggest draw however, is to make your online presence most resourceful for your customers. How you can extend this strategy to your social media platform depends on your own creativity. Some brands take social media platforms as their main customer support bases. You can post in queries or reviews on their social media pages and they would directly get back to you on these. However, beware of restraint on the strategy, it can get negative pretty fast if you do not keep it in check.

Get in step with the shift in technology

Shifting technology will always affect your overall online marketing and social media strategies. If your audience is moving towards a platform other than their desktops, you need to be moving your strategy to suit that choice. For instance, the emergence of tablets and Smartphone mean that most of social media marketing changed gears for mobile platforms. As such, social sites like Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr will be your most valid platform choices to connect with your audiences. You should also redesign your company blog to be responsive to every platform through which your audiences access it.

Analytics Vs. predictive tools

Tracking your moves during your social media strategy implementation has been the most important aspect for improvements in this regard. However, while earlier simple analysis tools remained your best bet to getting trackback information on your strategy, now you have a whole array of predictive tools at your disposal to get details that are more concurrent. These tools use data mining techniques, modeling and diverse statistics to give you abject information about your social media strategy.

Video marketing strategies

Single dimensional marketing will no longer fly for social media. You need to be up-to-date with what your target audience needs from you. Research has shown that most niche audiences tend to absorb more from short videos on popular video networking sites or on company websites than any other form of information distribu8tion. Having your own YouTube channel or Vimeo account is absolutely necessary but more important is to lock down on interesting content to share with your niche audiences via video marketing techniques.

Mobile applications for mobile platform marketing

Every survey conducted in the field of web accessibility has shown in multiple counts of results that prove that most websites are now being accessed over some kind of mobile platform – Smartphone, tablet or mobile gadgets. It is therefore, excessively important that your website be ready to face the challenge. In fact all your marketing solutions need to be designed to be mobile responsive and adaptive over a vast variety of technologies. This includes the interface design, so you have to keep your information fluid to make the most impact.

Engagement and interactive online presence

If you are just starting with your online branding strategies, you have to stay committed to the project for quite a while before you start seeing positive results. The idea is to create an engaging online presence. Your company should be the go-to resource when people start looking for interesting news and discussions pertaining to important topics in the niche. You have to be as up-to-date as possible and always make it a point to answer your readers and engage in actual conversations.

Your best resourceful tools for Social media marketing this year

1.) Facebook Advertisements – Advertising is very important and most social media platforms now give you the ideal platform to present your products on a platform which already as interested audiences flocking in. Facebook ads rose up like a shining beacon but they had started to lose traction during the last quarter of previous year. This year the platform has reinvented their platform with video advertisements, which give the companies a chance to humanize their messages making bigger impact on people.

2.) Google+ Ads – Google has just started testing out +post ads. Since this is one of the most powerful social media platforms considering direct association with Google, you should definitely be ready to roll out advertisements on this platform as soon as it rolls out the advantage.

3.) Twitter ads – Twitter launched TV ad targeting and many other re-branding overtures to create a renewed hype around the platform. The rebranding also included new ad interface design, which is rigged to attract a lot more attention on various social media as well as search engine platforms. It is safe to say that while the other platforms are still growing with their strategies, you can never take Twitter for granted. The platform should always be a part of your social media and advertisement strategy.